A World Worth Laughing At: Catch-22 and the Humor of Black Humor
By Daniel Green
Studies in the Novel, Vol. 27, No. 2
One can't help but note that in the commentary about the fiction conventionally identified with
the mode of "black humor" there is much discussion of what makes such fiction black, but little
of its humor. The most famous expression of this tendency occurs in probably the most
frequently cited book on black humor, Max Schulz's Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties. "I have
shied away from the humor in Black Humor," writes Schulz. Choosing instead to focus on what
he calls the "cosmic labyrinth," Schulz claims that "to give equal value to humor in any
consideration of this literature is possibly to let oneself be trapped by a term that came into being
somewhat capriciously and may not accurately describe that literature."(1) While it may be true
that several of the novels labeled as black humor at one time or another are not "humorous" in a
narrow sense, or that the term itself was adapted somewhat arbitrarily, Schulz's reluctance to deal
at length with books such as Catch-22 or Stanley Elkin's A Bad Man, clearly funny books by any
measure, evidences a common scholarly preference for the "cosmic" at the expense of the comic.
It might reasonably be assumed that criticism of individual novels would confront more directly
the vital role of comedy in their aesthetic and rhetorical operations. Such attention would seem to
be in order especially for Catch-22, which relies so systematically on what Frederick Karl has
catalogued as "puns, high jinks, slapstick, [and] witty dialogue."(2) However, by far most writing
about Catch-22 has focused like Schulz on more portentous issues of politics, philosophy,
economics, and even theology. In fact, to the extent that aesthetic or expressly literary issues are
raised seriously at all, they tend to be restricted to relatively traditional studies of sources and
precursors, or broadly thematic discussions of Heller's sense of what critics have chosen to term
"the absurd." While the novel clearly has affinities with absurdism, these affinities have
generally been used to distance Catch-22 from the kind of comedy associated with the devices
Heller exploits for absurdist effect.(3) While not everyone who unfair to cite the following
statement by Leon F. Seltzer as typical of the general thrust of opinion about the role of comedy
in Catch-22: "the novel's absurdities--comic and otherwise--operate almost always to expose the
alarming inhumanities which pollute our political, social, and economic systems."(4)
My intention is not to deny that Catch-22 does expose such inhumanities (clearly it does just that
for many readers), nor even for that matter to criticize the substance of previous commentary on
the novel, but to point out the implicit dichotomy between the "comic" and the "serious" created
by this commentary. Precisely because Catch-22 seems to most readers a fundamentally serious
work, I would argue, a reflexive critical assumption comes into play whereby comedy and humor
are seen as necessarily in service of something ostensibly more worthwhile, more identifiably
meaningful. In short, the logical inference to draw from the kinds of statements I have quoted is
that the comic cannot itself be serious.
An exception to the approach taken by the bulk of those in the first wave of Catch-22 criticism is
Morton Gurewitch in his book Comedy: The Irrational Vision. Gurewitch sees Catch-22 as
above all a "mad farce" so unrelenting as to effectively overwhelm any narrower didactic or
satiric impulses. "The satire," writes Gurewitch, "is devoured ... by omnivorous nonsense."(5) In
some ways this view could seem reminiscent of early responses to the novel which deemed it
unworthy of sustained attention. However, Gurewitch intends his assertion to be taken as a
laudatory judgement, and as such it is welcome recognition that the "merely funny" pervades
Catch-22, to the extent that analysis focusing on world view or ideology are at the very least
problematic. At the same time, Gurewitch's use of the word "nonsense" risks propping up the
same opposition between the comic and the serious I have described. It implies a comedy defined
by the absence of any positive content (although it must be said that Gurewitch celebrates
comedy for what he calls its "irrational freedom").(6) Opposing "sense" with "nonsense" does
not finally overcome what seems to be an inherent devaluation--embedded in critical discourse
itself--of the comedic impulse.
Despite the foregrounding of more solemn issues by critics such as Schulz and Seltzer, Catch-22
provides ample opportunity to explore this impulse. In fact, in my analysis Catch-22 is first and
foremost a comic novel whose primary structural principle is the joke and whose design and
execution are most appropriately construed as the vehicles of mirth. This description is also
intended to underscore the book's accomplishment, but without divorcing its comedy from its
overall seriousness of purpose. In my attempt to establish the inherent respectability of comedy
as a mode creating its own kind of meaning, I will draw on Jerry Palmer's analysis in his The
Logic of the Absurd,(7) which develops a convincing account of both the internal mechanism of
the joke and the effect successful jokes have on our reception of the texts which employ them.
Although Palmer's book focuses on film and television comedy, the burden of much of the
discussion that follows is precisely that Catch-22 shares essential characteristics with these
forms. (As does, moreover, an entire strain of contemporary American fiction, encompassing
loosely American "postmodern" writers and including Joseph Heller, which not only uses
comedy extensively but relies on strategies and conventions derived as much from popular
sources such as film and vaudeville as from purely literary traditions.)
Few novels in fact offer comedy as pure as that in Catch-22. No situation, not even the bloodiest
or most fearful, is insulated from the further indignity of the joke, or exempt from the comedic
reductio ad absurdum; no character, not even the apparent protagonist, escapes the ravages of
mockery and ridicule. While such thoroughgoing comedy is familiar to us in film--particularly
the American comic film descended from Mack Sennett--it is undoubtedly disconcerting to find
it in a purportedly "serious" work of literature depicting a subject as forbidding as war and its
consequences. Nevertheless, this brand of comedy distinguishes Catch-22 from the primary line
of twentieth-century comic fiction which uses comedy as a strategy to clearly satirical or
otherwise discursive ends, and it is here that Palmer's view of the comic process is most
illuminating.
Palmer argues for the necessity of a theory of comedy which values it for its own sake: "by
reducing comedy to the play of serious values (attacking A, promoting B) the nature of the
process, the pleasure which is specific to comedy and humour [sic], is lost."(8) Palmer contends
that comedy has a pull of its own which inevitably muddies the thematic waters a text might
otherwise seem to be navigating. His book's thesis, he writes, is that "ambiguities are built into
the reception of comedy and humour, and this for reasons that are fundamental to their nature"
(p. 18). He goes on to analyze in impressive and compelling detail the operations inherent in
comedy's fundamental nature, constructing a model which provides a basis for understanding the
way jokes and gags unfold, and which also explains their success or failure. On one level,
Palmer's account seems remarkably simple, as he divides the comic event into two distinct
moments, one during which occurs a disruption of narrative or contextual expectations, and a
second which leads to a laugh-producing contradiction: that the cause of the disruption--either a
verbal remark or visual image--is implausible yet at the same time contains a kind of plausibility
after all (p. 43). The clarity provided by this formulation, however, as well as its potential
relevance in a wide range of contexts and across generic boundaries, make it an effective tool for
gauging the reach and depth of the comic impulse. It is particularly provocative when applied to
a text like Catch-22, where this impulse has struck so many as being at best in conflict with
other, more overarching forces.
That Catch-22 engages in broad comedy is readily apparent from its first chapter, indeed its very
first sentence. But the reader attentive to comic structure and pattern, not simply as adjunct to
thematics but as source of intrinsic narrative and aesthetic pleasure, will not fail to appreciate a
passage such as the following:
The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine
what was troubling him. They hurled lights in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles
into nerves to hear if he could feel. There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his
lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for
his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and
pedantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly
into the Medical Corps by an faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the
dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.(9)
One almost waits for the rimshots at the end of such a performance (it has the feel in particular of
a more verbally playful Woody Allen joke). Although the ultimate effect of humor such as this
may be to contribute to the novel's overall sense of absurdity, it should be emphasized that the
immediate effect is laughter, and that the novel's knitting together of such moments is its primary
narrative strategy.
While "jokes" in the most conventional sense do not necessarily dominate the pages of Catch-22-
-they are nevertheless plentiful--the spirit and substance of comedy like the above does inform
much of the novel's exposition, as well as many of its character exchanges. Chapter II,
"Clevinger," for example, opens to a brief dialogue between the title character and Yossarian,
echoed in subsequent dialogue, which embodies and ultimately comments on this spirit:
Clevinger had stared at him with apoplectic rage and indignation and, clawing the table with both
hands, had shouted, "You're crazy!"
"Clevinger, what do you want from people?" Dunbar had replied wearily above the noises of the
officers' club.
"I'm not joking," Clevinger persisted.
"They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.
"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.
"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."
"And what difference does that make?" (pp. 11-12)
The tone of this interchange is suggestive of nothing so much as the patter of a vaudeville team,
and the humor evoked by such a passage clearly relies on the basic strategies of comedy, surprise
and incongruity. In replying "what difference does that make?" to Clevinger's declaration,
Yossarian is clearly disrupting the logical case Clevinger is trying to make for Yossarian's
"craziness." At first we find Yossarian's defense quite implausible (and therefore are perhaps
inclined to agree with Clevinger) but on second thought it makes its own kind of sense. What
difference does it make to Yossarian if he is in fact killed that everyone else is a target? The
ambiguity ensuing from these disparate responses provokes our laughter. It is this instinctive,
largely subconscious reaction which is prompted by what Palmer terms the "logic of the absurd"
(p. 44).
Moreover, Clevinger's disclaimer--"I'm not joking!"--ultimately works to highlight his position
as the butt of the joke being set up at his expense, both by Yossarian and by the shape of the
scene's own comic trajectory. Ironically, by the end of Chapter II Yossarian finds the tables
turned as he himself becomes the butt of the joke whose absurd but ruthless logic provides the
novel its title and controlling metaphor: Catch-22. Doc Daneeka informs him that the required
number of missions has been raised (from 44 to 50 at this point), and throughout the rest of the
book Yossarian struggles against the inescapable force of Catch-22, sometimes resisting actively
and at others more passively cutting his losses in his effort to somehow get the last laugh on the
system it represents. Doc Daneeka's explanation of the principle of Catch-22 suggests further the
relevance of Palmer' s schema; indeed, what is most disturbing about the whole idea of Catch-22
is explicable through its terms. We--and the airmen on Pianosa--are surprised by the obvious
manipulation and injustice embodied in this unofficial law. Its main tenet--that anyone who
would continue to fly missions after what Yossarian, Orr, and the others have been through
would be crazy, but that "anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy" (p. 41)--
seems a perversely implausible distortion of logic, but at the same time has a certain monstrous
plausibility as well. Even Yossarian is moved to admire such a catch, and Doc Daneeka
pronounces it "the best there is" (p. 41). If the world of Catch-22 is indeed "crazy," it is largely
because it is so thoroughly informed by the rigorous logic of comedy.
Not only is Yossarian repeatedly taken aback by the ubiquity of this logic, but readers of Catch-
22 must also be surprised by the unremitting manifestations of its all-encompassing joke in an
incongruous setting of bloody air war and inhuman exploitation where fear and misery are
translated into comic pratfalls. A large part of the book's artistic interest, I would argue, lies
precisely in the way in which Heller sustains his comic routines over the course of nearly 500
pages, as well as the way in which he joins these routines into a compelling, albeit highly
fragmented, narrative. Heller succeeds both in creating consistently startling comic moments and
in tying these moments together in a way which reflects and reinforces the fundamental nature of
the joke itself. Palmer describes two kinds of narrative which incorporate gags and jokes. The
first gathers such gags into an essentially self-sufficient sequence, while the second subordinates
the gags to an otherwise non-comic story. In the former case, comedy is presumed to be capable
of producing its own kind of satisfaction; in the latter, the comedy is employed as a supplement
to the story's non-comic core (pp. 141-42). While Palmer is perhaps correct to contend that
narratives of the first kind are rarely found in practice (especially in literature), Catch-22 comes
as close to this kind of narrative as any text in modern fiction. Further, while such a strategy
might seem a threat to narrative unity, in Catch-22 it can actually be seen to provide a kind of
unity that has previously been overlooked. What has appeared to be an excessively fragmented
narrative (or at least a too randomly fragmented one) can be read as a mammoth orchestration of
individual comic bits and routines into a kaleidoscopic comedy revue, the cumulative effect of
which is to situate Yossarian ever more irretrievably in the world defined by Catch-22. The
chronological fluidity of the story is partly induced by the logic of an absurdity as overwhelming
as this, and is partly an opportunity for the reader to reflect on the logic of the absurd itself as
played out under this text's conditions: that a world so irrational, where distinctions between
past, present, and future collapse, could actually exist seems implausible in the extreme, yet
when judged by the terms of its governing framework, the confusions of such a world seem
plausible indeed.
Thus does one of the most basic of comedic devices--the joke--serve both as the foundation of
individual scenes and episodes and as a central organizing principle of the novel as a whole, with
consequent ramifications not only vis-a-vis its aesthetic framework but also for any philosophical
or political positions it may be presumed to be advancing. Even more examples of scenes and
situations in Catch-22 explicable in terms of jokes and related kinds of "low" humor could be
adduced here--the "atheist" scene between the chaplain and Colonel Cathcart, for example, in
which the Colonel "plays dumb" (although he isn't really playing) in his astonishment that
atheism is legal, that the enlisted men pray to the same God as the officers, etc. But while many
readers might reluctantly acknowledge the book's reliance on such humor, it is the marginal
status of this kind of comedy that provokes even admirers to attribute supplemental value to its
use in order to "raise" the text to a more respectable and more suitably meaningful level of
discourse.
Again, examining the mechanism of the joke can help to explain why this happens. The balance
between the plausible and the implausible in a given joke is often delicate, and can itself
determine the impact of that joke. Palmer argues, for example, that contemporary audiences may
see only the implausible in silent film comedies, and therefore judge them to be merely silly.
Some audiences at the time, however, attended mostly to the plausible--that is, currently
relevant--features and thus, notably, "found them excessively 'black,' too abrasive to be funny"
(p. 57). Substituting "serious" or "disturbing" for "abrasive" in this statement, we can perhaps
begin to see how contemporary literary critics avoid or overlook the humor of black humor.
Implicit in Palmer's account of the operation of comedy is a kind of self-consciousness which if
not expressed directly through the text is potentially induced on the reader's side by the text.
Thus while comic fiction is not necessarily self-reflexive in the mode of more strictly defined
metafictions (e.g., John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse or Robert Coover's Universal Baseball
Association), that which, like Catch-22, unleashes the logic of the absurd does encourage an
awareness of textuality in those moments when the very mechanism of this logic compels the
reader to note the disruption of textual continuity. When the joke opens an especially wide gap-
that is, when the imbalance between the plausible and the implausible seems, initially at least,
very pronounced--the degree of such awareness can only increase. Here is perhaps the source of
both the primary effect of humor--laughter--and the temptation to devalue mere laughter among
"serious" readers, an apparent paradox that can be illustrated by looking at a scene skeptical
readers could well point to as fundamentally non-comic.
The scene inside Yossarian's airplane after it has been hit and his fellow airman Snowden
wounded is probably one of the most memorable episodes in Catch-22. Although portions of this
scene are replayed throughout the novel, its full impact is registered near the end in a final
flashback. Yossarian's memory does indeed for the most part unfold with appropriate sobriety:
Yossarian bent forward to peer and saw a strange colored stain seeping through the coveralls just
above the armhole of Snowden's flak suit. Yossarian felt his heart stop, then pound so violently
he found it difficult to breathe. Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. (p. 457)
But even here the solemnity and outright horror of the situation can easily be interrupted by a
joke:
A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into his other side just underneath the arm
and blasted all the way through, drawing whole mottled quarts of Snowden along with it through
the gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out ... Here was God's plenty, all right
[Yossarian] thought bitterly as he stared--liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach, and bits of the
stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes and
turned away dizzily and began to vomit, clutching his burning throat. (p. 457)
No doubt such a moment can, and has, been interpreted differently. Some might find it merely
tasteless; most probably assume it has some comprehensible relationship to the scene's--and the
book's--aesthetic or thematic design, and look to subordinate it to that design--thus the joke
serves to heighten the horror, reinforce the anti-war message, etc. While I would not deny that it
does either or both of these things, what gets overlooked in such an interpretation is the sheer
disruptiveness of the joke, the way it actually takes our attention away from the grossness of
"God's plenty" to contemplate the implausibility of the joke itself entering the narrative space
otherwise occupied by Snowden's internal organs. As Palmer has it, "any gag works by
contradicting discursively defined expectations" (p. 155), and the starkness of the contradiction
involved here makes for a particularly strong sense of implausibility--so much so that Heller
might seem to risk alienating readers for whom such a situation "deserve[s] only serious
treatment or behavior" (p. 206). Yet reflection does indeed suggest it is plausible after all that
Yossarian, continuously immersed as he is in death and mayhem, would be sickened only at the
sight of the less familiar stewed tomatoes.
In a scene like this, the comedic element is so unsettling that one's awareness of the discordant
note introduced can produce either the sense that Yossarian's squeamishness is mordantly funny
or that its origin in the repulsiveness of war makes its comic quality secondary. Readers whose
response is the latter are likely to find that perceptual gap created by the logic of the absurd to be
an abyss into which received notions of literary significance could disappear. But those whose
immediate response is laughter are acknowledging the integrity and the vitality of comedy,
although it would not be accurate to say such readers thus ignore the potentially provocative
insinuations of context--in fact, a definition of "black humor" would have to emphasize the
obvious way in which this particular brand of levity depends on a corresponding contextual
gravity.
Certainly not all scenes in Catch-22 are comic in the way I have described. Yossarian's descent
into the underworld on the streets of Rome, for example, seems clearly meant to convey a
sobering picture of the human predicament (although even here his obvious helplessness finally
only reinforces an overall view of him as a comic figure). Furthermore, comedy as absolute as
Catch-22 at its most extreme does almost unavoidably provoke consideration of its implications,
formal and thematic. It is finally only testimony to the impact of comedy, its capacity to be
meaningful in a variety of contexts, that the novel has drawn the weighty interpretations I
adduced previously. Misunderstanding and distortion result when the hermeneutic operations
involved in forming such interpretations are insufficiently distinguished from the operations of
comedy proper, or these latter operations are disregarded entirely. In effect, humor is erased as a
significant element of the text, becoming merely an incidental effect. Certainly joking in a
context perceived as especially serious or disturbing could elicit laughter resonant with questions
(not only "Why am I laughing?" but undoubtedly following from that immediate response), but
the joke itself remains separate from such questions, its structure independent of context. The
force of a given joke may indeed be related to its context, of course; the blackness of black
humor, while often overemphasized, cannot be ignored and is obviously meaningless except
through reference to context. The term "black humor," then, is perhaps most appropriately
defined as an unapologetic, unalloyed use of comedy in extreme situations which implicitly raise
very large, even profound, questions. Black humor of the sort found in Catch-22 neither
trivializes such questions nor foregrounds them, but rather broadens the range of experience to
which comedy is relevant.
The conclusion to Catch-22 has struck many readers as a particularly extreme situation, or at
least one with important implications for the novel's ostensible thematic emphasis. Many who
see Catch-22 as a satire or a philosophical treatise find the ending a cop-out. Why does
Yossarian choose to run away, they implicitly ask, rather than stay and work to change the
system? (Although such criticism overlooks the fact that the chaplain proposes to do just that.)
Should one conclude that the book is insufficiently serious from the outset, the ending could
conceivably seem a transparent attempt to graft on an explicitly antiwar message. A more
accurate assessment would conclude that the ending does leave a message, but also point out that
it is a message entirely consistent with the novel's preponderant use of comedy. If the world
depicted on Pianosa could be changed, surely by the end of this long novel a sign of such a
change would reveal itself. Yet Yossarian's lived-world remains essentially the same at the end
as it was when we first experienced it in the hospital ward. Nor are we as readers likely to feel
that the conditions of that lived-world have been neutralized, much less altered, by the extended
comic treatment of them. Instead, the comedy of Catch-22 is ultimately nonregenerative: its
relentless, frequently black humor does not finally call attention to situations, issues, or problems
that could be improved, resolved, or eliminated through increased human effort. The blackness
of the humor, in fact, may be a function of this final despair. In the face of a world so wholly
irredeemable, Yossarian's only alternative is to abandon it in a gesture of personal survival. He
may have managed to get the last laugh, but it is a feeble one, and his apparent optimism about
the possibilities of "Sweden" make this reader feel the joke is still on him.
Palmer ultimately addresses what he calls the "effectivity" of comedy. He concludes that humor
"is neither essentially liberatory nor conservative, for its nature is such that it always refuses to
make any commitment to any 'opinion' about anything (except of course the opinion that levity is
appropriate under these circumstances)" (p. 213). Possibly what has driven scholars to neglect
the role of comedy in Catch-22 is the sense that under the circumstances portrayed by this novel-
-war, death, systemic oppression--"levity" does not seem appropriate. Perhaps there are
situations, attitudes, and beliefs that are off limits to comic treatment, but surely comic art can be
served only by those who reject taboos of decorum and give free rein to the logic of comedy; the
unrestrained play of this logic once unleashed achieves the only truly serious purpose of comedy,
which is finally to expose the potentially ridiculous even if what is exposed proves disturbing or
offensive. Joseph Heller does so unleash the inherent force and energy of the comic impulse, and
this more than its concern with the "alarming inhumanities" of the system makes Catch-22 a
sobering work of literature. Thus, while "black humor fiction" may do little to enhance our
knowledge of the "cosmic labyrinth," it does greatly enhance our understanding of the legitimate
reach of comedy: even the most grave or the most exalted of subjects can be subjected to the
logic of the absurd. Catch-22 will not tell you how to live or what to think or even what's worth
thinking about. It will tell you what's worth laughing at.
NOTES
1 Max Schulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1973), p. x.
2 Frederick R. Karl, "Joseph Heller's Catch-22: Only Fools Walk in Darkness," A "Catch-22"
Casebook, ed. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973),
pp. 159-65.
3 Robert Brustein's early assertion that Catch-22 "penetrates the surface of the merely funny"
("The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World," Kiley and McDonald, pp. 6-11) has been echoed by
many subsequent critics and scholars: "Catch-22 goes beyond just capturing the form of
absurdity, it moves toward a metaphysical statement about reality and truth in the contemporary
world" (Howard Stark, "The Anatomy of Catch-22," Kiley and McDonald, pp. 145-58); "The
Catch-22 joke is not even very funny the first time, and in fact ... it is no joke" (Vance Ramsey,
"From Here to Absurdity: Heller's Catch-22," Kiley and McDonald, pp. 221-36); "[T]he comic
anarchy which provokes it is only the surface of Catch-22, not its sustaining structure" (Clinton
S. Burhans Jr., "Spindrift and the Sea: Structural Patterns and Unifying Elements in Catch-22,"
Nagel, pp. 40-51.
4 Leon F. Seltzer, "Milo's 'Culpable Innocence': Absurdity as Moral Insanity in Catch-22,"
Critical Essays on Joseph Heller, ed. James Nagel (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984), pp. 74-92.
5 Morton Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 126.
6 Gurewitch, p.223.
7 Jerry Palmer, The Logic of the Absurd (London: BFI Publishing, 1987).
8 Ibid., p. 14. Much of Palmer's analysis is directed toward identifying and preserving humor's
specificity. Although Palmer insists that his book is not a critique of Freud's view of jokes in
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and that he is pursuing "latent implications of
Freud's theory" (p. 219), he nevertheless argues that Freud failed to discriminate sufficiently
between the impact of jokes and other verbal phenomena on psychic processes. Palmer strongly
believes that jokes, and humor generally, have a discernible structure and signifying capacity
independent of any role in the signifying system of the unconscious as a whole.